What do I think about fish farming? Read the long answer below the picture...

In early January, Elena and I visited Hubbs-Sea World. They do ocean research, so they seemed like good people for us to know. For years, they've bred white sea bass and released them in to the oceans to help repopulate our waters. And for years they've been experimenting with aquafarming. In the past decades, aquafarming has gotten a lot more attention as the wild populations of fish in different parts of the world have been overfished.

That was our introduction to aquaculture and since then, aquaculture seems to be popping up in the news a lot. Jay also wrote a good blog on the subject.

Then in early February, we were able to attend the Seafood Choices Summit. Each year, about 500 people get together to discuss the sustainable seafood, and this year it took place in San Diego.

The participates were an eclectic mix of environmental organizations, scientists, fishermen, aquaculture companies, aquaculture food companies, restaurants, retailers, and government departments. And all of these people seemed genuinely committed to the idea that the oceans are in trouble and we need to protect them. This, to me, was fascinating to see - all these groups with such different interests looking at a shared problem.

Aquaculture was the topic on everyone’s mind. The logic went something like this:

* The population of the world is growing, maybe to level off at 9 billion
* Fish are very healthy for people to eat
* There is great consumer demand for fish
* There are fewer fish in the oceans
* People will be healthier and better fed if we can produce a lot of fish with aquaculture in a way that doesn’t harm the ocean

At that point in the line of reasoning, you lose the fishermen. They don’t want to see their way of life change and small coastal communities disappear. The others (environmentalists, scientists, etc.) are sympathetic towards the fishermen, but continue down the aquaculture road. The next step is this:

There are examples of aquaculture with minimal environmental impact on the ocean such as Kona Blue in Hawaii where they do an amazing job at caring for the ocean and the fish they raise. Waste, disease, escape, and the other problems with aquaculture have been minimized through science and good management. However, there is bad aquaculture continuing around the world. We should support aquaculture in the U.S. because we can do it better here.

At that point, the NGOs give aquaculture projects their approval because the oceans will benefit overall if we don’t outsource it to less regulated countries.

Then the aquaculture farms get hammered for feeding anchovies (and sardines) to the fish they are raising. If you take 5 pounds of anchovies out of the ocean, feed that to your fish, and only end up with a pound of fish, people start thinking you’re not efficiently using the world's resources.

In response, scientists work on figuring out what else fish can eat and, little-by-little replace anchovies with other things, mostly soybeans. So now you can get a pound of farmed fish out of under two pounds of anchovies, and in the future, scientists believe they can replace even more of the fish food with other ingredients such as wheat gluten so that anchovies may only be needed in very small amounts.

To summarize, the U.S. imports lots of fish. Fish farming is done around the world in ways that are mostly not-so-friendly to the oceans. Now that we have the knowledge of how to do it well, we should do it ourselves in the U.S. and stop exporting this problem to other parts of the world.

Why we need to watch the watchdogs

NGOs generally don't look beyond the logic we've described above. If the individual fish farm doesn’t hurt the ocean immediately around it, then the NGOs give it their seal of approval. And the public trusts the NGOs.

Some of you may have read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In it, Michael Pollan describes the dysfunctional relationship the U.S. has with corn and soybeans and industrial agriculture in general. Crops are heavily subsidized, demand large amounts of pesticides and fossil fuel fertilizers, and are creating enormous health, environmental, and economic problems for our country and the world. The NGOs need to widen their vision to encompass these issues. It’s not that the NGOs are lying or aren’t looking out for our best interests, they just have too narrow of a field of vision. If they (or we) don’t expand that field of vision, unsustainable practices will continue unchecked.

At the Seafood Choices conference, I spoke to a person who runs a feed company and asked him about the sustainability of fish food. He admitted that there was a problem with the sustainability of everything they put in their feed and that it was the question that no one really has an answer to. The problem is, in fact, so overwhelming that it could stop aquaculture right in its tracks. And no one I talked to at the conference wants that to happens, so they pretend the sustainability of feed ingredients is not for aquaculture to address. The problem can be ignored if you only look at the oceans. The feed problem is the agricultural scientists' problem.

What’s wrong with converting one kind of protein in to another that taste better?

We have an interesting little company in San Diego called San Diego Soy Dairy. They take soybeans, use electricity and labor, and convert them into tofu. A lot of people like tofu a lot more than raw soy beans. At the restaurant, we have a similar job of using electricity, gas, and labor to convert ingredients into something that people like to eat.

Is it wrong for aquaculture to do that same thing? Aquaculture basically takes anchovies and soybeans and converts them to desirable fish. I would argue that it is because aquaculture today depends on unsustainable industrial agriculture and limited supplies of anchovies whereas making tofu and running a restaurant can be done with sustainable inputs.

Some of the sustainability issues with food could be solved. The feed could be made with fish trim not fit for human consumption. The soy and other ingredients could be from organic sources. The ingredients could be obtained regionally. These things would make fish farming more acceptable.

However, as aquaculture scientists try to feed more and more soy and other proteins to fish to get away from the limited supply of anchovies, they incur another problem: the fish are less nutritious. This is analogous to the difference between corn feed and grass fed beef, the latter being higher in omega-3s.

Is aquaculture any better than cattle being raised in a feedlot?

Most fish are cold blooded and don’t need to produce heat. They also don’t need to support their weight against gravity, so they are efficient at converting feed into edible calories. Fish seem happy floating around in an ocean pen. In deep water with ocean currents, fish waste is dispensed across a wide enough space in the ocean to turn what would be toxic if concentrated in to something that can be a nutrient for other organisms, instead of a lake of toxic cow manure like you get near a feed lot. Yes, aquaculture done right can be much better than a cattle feedlot, but it still depends on unsustainble inputs of feed.

Feeding the world with aquaculture

Should we feed the world with aquaculture? No, because it depends on feed from an unsustainable industrial agricultural system. If my motivation were truly to feed those 9 million people that we will probably have on earth in the next 50 years, I’d make them eat anchovies and soybeans. That’s much more efficient than feeding these things to fish and then eating the fish. In fact, in Peru where the population is relatively poor and they have the world’s greatest stock of anchovies in the world, a campaign was run where they put full color inserts in the newspaper touting the health benefits and low price of anchovies, as well as recipes including anchovies by top Peruvian chefs. So that makes me believe that there’s an ulterior motive to aquaculture, and that motive being money for the fish farming companies. I don’t see anything wrong with that, but let’s not pretend that we’re saints trying to feed the world when we’re really converting something that people don’t like the taste of very much into something that people will pay money for.

Should fish be a big part of everyones' daily diet? I see fish as a something that should be savored in small amounts. There is a limited supply of fish. A mostly vegetarian diet is the best way to go. Just because there is a demand for seafood doesn't mean that filling that demand is the right thing to do, even if it will make some people a lot of money.

“We need to farm the ocean as we farm the land.”

This was said by Jacques Cousteau back in 1973. It turns out that the current state of ocean aquaculture is much different than farming on land. Farming on the land, at least organic farming, is about converting the sun's almost unlimited energy into food. Farming the sea, it turns out, is about farming on land, and then converting the product of that into a higher value protein. It's more like cooking than farming. One exception, I believe, is shrimp farming in Madagascar. I'm not sure how they do it in other places, but my understanding is that it is done in an extremely sustainable way there and that the shrimp food is algae grown in the water on site. I wouldn't buy that shrimp because it would have to be shipped around the world, but that to me is more like farming. It seems we are so farm from that in the rest of the world of aquaculture, that calling it farming is a misleading analogy.

Back to Hubbs

I think Hubbs has a great group of smart people who want to use their knowledge about aquaculture to help the U.S. They know a lot about raising fish, but they leave the question of what they feed the fish to the feed companies. Organic, sustainable fish food could be a solution, although the healthfulness of the fish would be diminished making wild caught preferable.

The scale of the Hubbs project also concerns me. I believe they estimate production of 3 times the amount of fish that San Diego fishermen currently bring in each year. Things that are sustainable and environmentally friendly on a small scale can cause big problems when done on a big scale, especially given the experimental nature of the project.

Hubbs should experiment with responsible small scale aquaculture that uses sustainable feed sources. It may turn out that aquaculture done in this way, which internalizes all the environmental costs, is not economically feasible; or may surprise me turn out to be no worse than San Diego Soy Dairy. I believe our main focus should be on tending to our ocean's natural ecosystems and the health of our fisheries.

If you'd like to learn more, the Don Kent from Hubbs will describe the plan at the San Diego Surfrider Foundation meeting on March 18th. The meeting is at Forum Hall in UTC (above Wells Fargo bank), starts at 7pm & open to all.